Mary Catelli's Erraticly Updated and Exceedingly Ill-Organized Journal

So in this Gamelit world, sorcerers have to adventure by law, and tend to adventure until they have a spell -- or several -- that is new. 

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You want to keep the story hopping with liveliness and activity, or at least filled with quiet drama, all the time.  Cut out the dull parts rather than summarize them, to keep the reader engaged.

Well, usually.


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In Doctor Who, characters frequently duck behind the nearest piece of furniture to hide, and it usually works.  Even if the furniture has some hole in its structure. . . .

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From the Readercon blurb:

I think this one gets the ten-foot pole, too.  (poke, poke, poke)

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part of bittercon 

One thing I've always hated -- and I know I'm not alone -- is when characters show up and aid the hero.  For no apparent motive.  And they never acquire any such motive or even grind any axes of their own.

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One useful rule is that the villains have to be more powerful than the heroes.

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The hero and the villain collided at full speed, so that there is no possibility of their both coming through it, and the villain has indeed bought it.  And there's the cracked pieces all over the floor.

Time to sweep them up in the denouement.  The marrying' and the buryin', as Mark Twain put it.

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I rambled about having things do lots of things here, but after some comments on one of my Bittercon posts, I feel inspired to expand on this for foreshadowing.

Other things, sometimes you can get away with something that just advances the plot, or just characterizes.  But set-up and foreshadowing are particularly hard to do.  Oh, yes, this is going to be important later -- and there is no suspense about whether it's going to be important later.

Yes, you have to show the gun in Act One to fire it in Act Three.  But dumping it in the middle of Act I is clumsy.  Have Jack point it out in the first act as his father's, to characterize him.

Come to think of it, this goes double for red herrings.  If they serve a purpose -- and a purpose equal to their development  -- the reader won't be as frustrated when they don't pan out.  When you don't, well, Aristotle skewer it a long time ago:

The Rhetoric of Fiction by Wayne C. Booth

This is a how-to-write book.  Despite the clever disguise as a geeky academic textbook complete with bibliography and footnotes -- and the disguise is so thorough that it actually is a geeky academic textbook complete with bibliography and footnotes.

Anyway, it's about how writers actually do get readers to view the characters and circumstances the way they want them to.  How we maintain interest in the story.  Whether some demands about novels really don't make sense as shown by the way that many novel rely on the "faults" to work.   He touches on techniques from commentary from omniscient narrators to judicious adjectives and discusses how techniques -- even the modern, popular ones -- have their limitations as well as their uses.

He even makes sense when talking about how writers write.  Most literary critics who aren't fiction writers on the side talk about how writers write and reveal that they will never, ever, ever manage to write fiction.

In his afterword (to the second edition) he says he once had a lively discussion with a class of fourth graders on the rhetoric of fiction.  Which is to say that he asked, "How do you tell the good guys from the bad guys?" and they were off.  This treats the matter in somewhat more complex manner -- but it touches on that, too.

One thing you really can not evade with prequels, even if you kept things on a personal level.

And that is -- the backstory you already have plotted out.  Suppose you gave your hero's mentor a tragically murdered wife.  And then you do a prequel about the mentor.  You have to put in the wife.  And you have to murder her.  And while you can evade the matter, you really ought to develop her and make her sympathetic and have it be as tragic as you hinted at.  Because in the backstory, you only hint at things that will be much more dramatic, and excruciating, in the story itself, but we want the full scale of it that would justify the effect of it on the mentor, later.

Or the villain treacherously attacked his own men when he realized they would not support his revolt.  That will establish him as a villain of the first order of magnitude.  In the prequel, however, you have to show it in action.  And develop the betrayed men as characters so we feel the extent of the villainy.  And not give them any means of escape that preclude the events in later books -- and, in order to establish the depths of his villainy, probably none at all.  If you do that, you will have done the aesthetically correct thing, and I will approve, even if I want to murder you.  But if you wimp out. . . .

For some reason, the one point at which writers wimp out is when they depicted a character in an unhappy marriage.  In the prequel, you have to show how the character came to make such a stupid match.  I have yet to read an aesthetically satisfying book in which I was convinced that, yes, the character -- the same character we see in the latter books -- really did marry such a ill-suited spouse.